«Mademoiselle Aïssé was the woman which launched the grotesque trend called robe à la circassienne. Her destiny signed the history of costume in an exceptional way: coming from the Circassia, in the area of the Caucasus, beautiful and impatient, she was purchased at the slave market in Constantinople by the ambassador of France Monsieur de Ferriol.

Her dress was open at the front and featured from three cords to be raised up to the ankle, sleeves more short of those of the petticoat, which instead had a cascade of lace that cames to the wrist.

Obtained with fabrics with strong colors contrasting and adorned with stripes and animal inserts, the Circassian style she anticipated centuries in its essence the spirit of the punk of the second half of the twentieth century.

Aggression and amazement, break with the elegant schemes of a respectable style, suburban origin they are just some of the affinities that in a pindaric flight join two worlds apparently very distant between them.»

It’s the end of the Nineteenth century, the world seems to change too vortically. Metal stands out from the cemented streets of the metropolises and promises to touch the sky. New generations clash with old ones, cabarets are crowded with “cocottes”, bars by artists drowning in absinthe along with prostitutes. On Sundays people wear the “good dress”, a white one if wealthy. The way to remember changes, photography replaces the paintings, and describes that strange fashion that raged during the Victorian Age reaching the first decades of the new century: spiritualism. From Tsars’ Russia to Villa Santa Barbara in Cefalù, charismatic, mystical and visionary characters move crowds of adepts eager for knowing the secrets of life and death. The mood of general social transformation, the new monstrous worlds created by capitalism, generate anxiety, terror, disease. Tuberculosis and syphilis are just two of the many viruses that merciless decimate men and women, daguerreotypes try to uselessly stop those existences, but they are only photographs. Hence people meet at home, in the living room, they close the heavy brocade curtains and around a table with three legs the hands of those present are clutched in a chain, and the medium invokes the presence. Below you can find a selection of antique images proving the practice of spiritualism between the late 1800s and early 1900s. Like all the trends, there bloomed numerous photographic cabinets, specialized in portraying those images that took the name of “spiritual photographs”. Some of those images are the result of a skilled and precursor practice of photo editing, which special effects have helped to fuel the flames of hope, the morbidness of knowledge like the wind on the fire, consuming the poignant nights of that lost time.

Katie King was a popular ghost evocated by Florence Cook, and was already the name given by Spiritualists in the 1870s to what they believed to be a materialized spirit. The question of whether the spirit was real or a fraud was a notable public controversy of the mid-1870s.

Eusapia Palladino, born in 1854 in Minervino Murge, near Bari: she was one of the best known and accredited mediums of all time. The initiation into spiritism came when, working as a waitress with a rich family, she began to take part in the sessions inside the luxurious home. It was during those sessions that phenomena never happened before were ascribed to the presence of the young woman. In her career as an occultist she gained world fame by captivating aristocrats and scientists, including Cesare Lombroso and even Pierre and Marie Curie.

Eusapia Palladino Hands. Collection Tony Oursler

The well-know italian medium Eusapia Palladino during a spiritual seance

Eusapia Palladino at the home of Camille Flammarion, Rue Cassini. Full levitation of a table. 12 November 1898

Victorian Spiritualism Movement Seance conducted by John Beattie in Bristol in England, 1872

Ghost levitation

Amazing spirit photography by astonishing William Hope: english author, photographer, sailor, and body-builder

William Hope

William Hope

William Hope

French medium Marthe Beraud aka Eva Carriere

A young woman face appear from ectoplasm by Eva Carriére – 1912

1912: Eva Carriere has a spiritic light between her hands and a materialization on her head.

Often during the seance sessions, a semi-liquid substance materialized, or was supposed to materialize, it came out of the medium’s orifices, to which the scientist Charles Richet gave the name of ectoplasm. It could take many forms, attributable to the existence of the person who passed away.

The ectoplasm comes out as a regurgitation from the mouth of the medium into a trance